The diminutive Raspberry Pi celebrates its first birthday today, and by way of a toast to the million-selling miniature kit, we bring news of high altitude geezer Dave Akerman's latest Rasberry Pi In The Sky tomfoolery - a geekgasmic combination of ARM power and Time Lord tech.
On Wednesday, Dave and Anthony Stirk - they of Low …

Re: If we are to be fussy about acronyms....

As a pendant (since there are lots about today), I would like to point out that all real acronyms are intended to be pronounced. It is only the merkins that seem to think that all abbreviations are called acronyms.

Re: Shut up you incorrect pedants!

405 line PAL for the early 60's, 625 line mid 60's (BBC2 & Colour).

While Susan stated she made up the name from the initials & in the early years generally refered to as The Ship. It didn't stop The Meddling Monk, The War Chief, The Time Lords Prosecution Team, The Master etc who hadn't met her, from using that name either.

Re: Shut up you incorrect pedants!

Re: Shut up you incorrect pedants!

405 line telly was never PAL, it was mono. There were experiments with NTSC on 405, but that only works over a cable; do it wirelessly and real-world wave propagation phenomena distort all the colours. They also tried SECAM, but the delay line required at 10.25 kHz scan rate was too expensive.

The irony is that PAL -- which automatically corrects the errors that plague NTSC over the air, dispenses with the over-complexity of SECAM, and still has little to no effect on existing mono receivers -- was chosen over an RGB-native system, when the move to a new broadcast frequency band (UHF) and a new line structure (625 lines) meant there was no need for the new system to be compatible with existing sets anyway!

But ...

>> has little to no effect on existing mono receivers ... there was no need for the new system to be compatible with existing sets anyway!

But, when 625 line and colour on UHF came along, there were still mono sets, and would be for many years. So while there may have been no requirement for backwards compatibility with existing 405 line VHF sets, there was a requirement for compatibility with new mono sets.

Besides all that, I struggle to see how an RGB system could have been easily implemented at the time - in analogue, and without all that much by way of available chippery. Of course it's a different matter now with all this digital malarky, but looking back, colour was like the proverbial dancing bear - the wonder is no that it was so good considering the limitations of the technology available at the time, but that it did it at all.

Re: But ...

"But, when 625 line and colour on UHF came along, there were still mono sets, and would be for many years. So while there may have been no requirement for backwards compatibility with existing 405 line VHF sets, there was a requirement for compatibility with new mono sets."

Not really. It was always planned to run the two systems side by side for about the lifetime of a TV receiver. If people wanted a mono set, they could have bought a 405-line one (knowing that its usefulness would expire suddenly one day); or if they wanted a 625-line set, they would have had to have bought a colour one. Besides which, someone would eventually have worked out how to build a mono receiver capable of using the "designed first and foremost for colour" transmission standard.

This is what it means to be British

I would just like to say that....................

..............if anyone is intending to move a gas cylinder in that fashion anywhere near me I would much appreciate the earliest possible warning (so that I can leave town immediately). Where I work we use two-wheeled cylinder trolleys - much less exciting and butch than man-hauling cylinders containing flammable/explosive gasses but much safer.